Society 2
Society 2Samuel Langhorne
Clemens
How society affects and reflects in his writings.
Often the environment and culture surrounding a writer will affect the styles and subjects of literature in any certain era (Local Color). William D. Howels, Nathaniel Hawthorne, John Greenleaf Whittier, and James Russell Lowell are such writers who were under this influence. However, Samuel Langhorne Clemens, also known as Mark Twain, was not only under this influence but he wrote according to his current surroundings. Clemens was an observer, viewing the world through his eyes alone but with an unique endowed and profound sense of understanding. Clemens deep personal senses of right and wrong, time and place which he gained from his uncanny ability to see the world around him. Whatever the event, natural, supernatural or man made, often became a topic for serious discussion with friends while playing billiards and material for one of his stories (Time Line). Some subjects that were features in Clemens novels were social injustices and social criticism; and his views on government.
“The rain…falls upon the just and the unjust alike; a thing which would not happened if I were superintending the rains affairs. No, I would rain softly and sweetly on the just, but if I caught a sample of the unjust outdoors I would drown him” (World Literature 3721).
In the novel The Prince and the Pauper, Clemens was able to underscore some of the social follies and injustices of his own time without actually having to attack them directly in the novel. Clemens did this by satirically treating the social and legal conventions of Tudor England. Clemens then assumed his readers would recognize for themselves the parallels with their own time. “Hence, religious intolerance is the target of ‘In Prison,’ a chapter in which two women, who have kindly befriended Edward and Miles, are mercilessly burned at the stake because they are Baptists. Tom Cantly, as king, labors to change laws which are unduly harsh or blatantly unjust; and Edward himself learns of the unnecessary cruelty of prisons, as well as the nature of the kind of life poor people must endure as a result of their poverty” (American Literature 202).
However, Clemens major criticism of society, both Tudor and his own, is mistaking the outward appearances of men or their circumstances as a final gauge of their true worth. The novel suggests that under different circumstances, any man could be a king - just as Tom Canty, given the opportunity, learns to be one. Tom and Edward are equally intelligent and virtuous young boys, but each is born to a different kind of “court.” “Chance and circumstances alone determine much of our behavior and...
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